maybe video problem?

[donnybrasco]

ok i run RTW. on the site map for the country's or the battlefield. my game skips... it will be smooth then freeze then move on or something. for example when the dude is giving you orders for the learning battle. half the time he will repeat his words because of the skiping.... i cant say its low fps. its alittle different...

it will run smooth for 2 to 5 seconds then he will repeat for a seconds or two....

i have 9700 pro
3.06 p4
1gig 3200 ram
enough harddrive space....
i dont know if a setting is messed up.? i have latest ati drivers with 9.0c dx

the weird thing about it is.... when i go from all highest to all lowest... there is barely a difference in performance(still the same crappy skipping)

so i dont know whats going on.... i currently am playing sims 2 to.... and it does it every once and awhile not as much as RTW. so im thinking my comp's settings isnt config'ed correctly. is there any program to check or correct my video cards performance?

what should i do?

[Red Harvest]

1st thought is to check sound drivers or configuration. A lot of stutters are caused by the sound card. What do you use for sound? Did you build this or is it a retail build? Sometimes changing the PCI slot of the soundcard will cure issues like this.

[donnybrasco]

i custom build it....

soundblaster audigy 2

i never really encountered that stutter*better term to use* until recently

would the soundcards stutter make the performance skip altogether to?

[donnybrasco]

ok here is a few tricky things.....

when i turn my camera away from that big battle it helps with the choppyness by a good amount... and of course when i move it back... it gets worse.....

but when i press esc its paused....dooh and the menu comes up....well with the camera to nothing it skips alittle the mouse freezes for a second

when i turn the camera back to the armys in the other side of the river its only a little bit more skipping.... but thats where im confused...

even with the game paused and the graphics on lowest on 16bit with all the effects turned off and sound muted the and in the menu the mouse gets moved around and you can still see the freezing cuz the mouse wont move for a second or two...

so its obviously not the game....im thinking maybe its the directx 9.0c thats the only thing i can come up with....i didnt change anything else....

and its not like my computer cant handle the game.... so im stuck if anyone has an idea on what to do... hook it up! heh thnx for help!

[Red Harvest]

Which PCI slot did you put the Audigy 2 in? With most AMD based chipsets (at least VIA based) there are four physical interrupt lines (A,B,C,D). These are shared among devices. I don't know if your Intel based board is the same or not. Anyway, certain slots share with other slots. The one closest to the vid card usually shares with AGP (not the one that can be used in place of AGP, that is Slot 1, this is Slot 2.) Other slots might share with one another, the USB ports, onboard sound (if available), or IDE. So the solution to stutters or crashes is sometimes to change the PCI slot for the soundcard. This happened a lot a few years back, not sure how much it applies anymore. (I got burned by this myself although it was a different PCI device that was sharing, rather than sound. At least it was easy to fix!)

OK, other stuff: uninstall/reinstall sound drivers, ditto for vid drivers. If you have upgraded DX, it is not uncommon to need to reinstall vid drivers. Why? I don't know, but it works sometimes.

You might also try turning sound acceleration down in Windows. This is often used to get Soundblaster stuff to behave.

Some Audigy owners might know what sort of sound config works best. It used to be with Soundblasters that you did a "driver only" install, skip all the controls and what not because they gave trouble. Don't know if that is even possible anymore.

One other thing that I've had trouble with is some of the Windows multi-language support. When I had it installed it made a mess of games if I loaded Internet Explorer before playing (very similar to the pauses you get--and also crashes.) It also made IE really slow to scroll, etc. It was a massively bugged application and would not unload when IE was closed. It also did not have a delete feature, so I hunted down the .exe and deleted it manually. If I didn't run IE first it was fine. Deleting the internat.exe (think that was the name) did the trick permanently. This was on Win98SE, don't know if it ever happens with XP. IE6 has some nasty bugs that screw up Win98SE (effecting Wordpad, IE6, and even large directory deletions.)

You might also have some process running that is polling periodically in the background. I had a problem with a removeable CD Burner years ago that did that every 30 seconds or so. I'm not a Windows XP expert, but there are sites on the web describing how to pick and choose what processes to run.

Good luck!

[donnybrasco]

ok to answer the first question my soundcard is in(i will try to picture it out)

AGP

blank

wireless adapter

USB hub2.0

soundcard

blank

so the 4th slot FROM the vid or AGP slot....

i will try to reinstall my vid drivers;
if doesnt work i will reinstall sound drivers;
if that doesnt work i will try an install driver only on the sound without the mediasource bs;
and if that doesnt work i will change the soundcard slot... but the question is is where do i change it to...what slot... the first one next to AGP or switch with one of the others?

witch slot would be best?...i know i can just try every stinking slot but that will be hell im hoping you or someone would have an idea before i get to that step on where to put it

i dont know much about that multilanguage thing so i cant really comment on that..

my motherboard is soyo dragon ultra PX400 i think the model
3200 corsair 1gig mem
120gig harddrive westurn digital
3.06 P4

[RJV]

You've probably already done this, but have you disabled any anti-virus software you may have? I have had a similar (though not as pronounced) problem with X2 The Threat when forgetting disable NAV. Just a thought.

Cheers,
Rob.

[Red Harvest]

Hmm, that wireless adapter might be a problem. I suspect it is sharing with the AGP. That's a VIA based motherboard so we might be on the right track. Could you pull it to do some testing? Does your Soyo manual have an Interrupt table? My ASUS does (with an error or two in it, of course!)

You might consider swapping the sound card to slot 3 if pulling the wireless adapter doesn't help. On my ASUS, slot 3 shares a physical interrupt with the onboard audio. So with onboard audio disabled, it would be a natural place to put your soundcard (assuming your board has the same interrupt table.) The sound will most likely need to be on slot 3 or 4, although it might work best on 5. Also, with my ASUS, the onboard USB controller shares with slot 5.

If your board has the same interrupt pattern (being in the VIA family) I would try:
Slot 1 -- empty (AGP card is there so nothing would fit anyway)
Slot 2 -- empty
Slot 3 -- Soundcard (onboard sound must be disabled.)
Slot 4 -- Wireless Adapter
Slot 5 -- USB hub

I forgot to mention in the previous post, you might want to check your BIOS to make sure any onboard sound is disabled. You've probably already done that...

[donnybrasco]

well i switched the soundcard and my wireless adapter no change.... it seems like its really bad in the mini battle you have to do in the begining once your on the campaign it is really horrible only sometimes.....

you think it is just the 9700? maybe i need a new video card

onboard sound is disabled....

seems like im always doing this with my computer

until i get more money.... heh

you think if it would be all choppy like that in RTW it will be the same way with MTW?

im stuck i know nothing else to do to make the performance better. i just think its the video card...i need a better one, unless you know 9700 pro should be able to run RTW fine i dunno

[dlundie]

Athlon 1700xp
KT 133A Via Motherboard
Geforce FX 5200 128MB
512mb PC133
Soundblaster live 5.1 de
Windows XP Home

Thats what i have.. and as you can see im due for a new PC soon. Your PC should be fine as its much more powerful than mine. What i suggest is this and its the big hammer approach.

get out you motherboard manual and check your settings in you BIOS, i did it and got a 25% increase on my PC because eveything was at default and not optomised.

Do a clean Windows install and add all the latest drivers and updates for windows and for you cards.

Just put on Rome

Set it on low and slowly work your way up.

If this fails then something is really wrong, like i said you have a very decent PC and your video card is fine for Rome, if you dont want your video card i will sure buy it off you.

[dlundie]

And yes, Rome works on my PC fine.

[Stuie]

@donnybrasco: Have you tried running dxdiag to see if DirectX identifies any problems?

Just go Start > Run, type in "dxdiag" and click "OK".

[SirGrotius]

from the specs you listed, your computer should run rome like an ethiopian runs a marathon.

the dxdiag seems the way to go. i was experiencing choppiness, particularly during the main menu screen, and other assorted unpleasantries, w/ a much lower-end system than your own, and here's what i'd recommend, have a huge crash, something which will give you an error report. it happened to me, i sent the error report to microsoft and the next day i got an update which fixed all my problems. rome is worth the effort.

[donnybrasco]

thnx for all your help guys! i appreciate the reply's. i did get the game running smooth and i tweaked my settings in my bios and i have a few other questions though.... ok i changed these settings to make the game run better:

went to agp P2P bridge control,
aperture size i changed from 64mb to 128mb because my video card(9700) has 128. it goes up to 256 but i dont know if i should go that high

*Select the size of accelerated graphics port(agp) aperture. the aperture is a portion of the PCI memory address range dedicated for graphics memory address space. host cycles that hit the aperture range are forwarded to the AGP without any translation.*

i dont know what this means so if someone can explain this to me and maybe tell me what PCI memory is? and if it would be ok to go up to 256mbs

then i enabled all these which were disabled:

AGP fast write
master 1ws write
master 1ws read
DBI output for AGP Trans.

i dont know what all these are but they improved my video cards performance.

in my bios there is a Dram Clock setting. the max is 200mhz, which is what its set at now. does this have anything to do with the bus speed of the memory... i have pc 3200 or 400mhz bus speed. so im confused on this.

also could i change the voltage of the CPU vcore, AGP, or DDR?
would that make the comp run faster. i think i have to leave the DDR and AGP voltage the same.

so for anyone having the same problem as me check out those things above i'm not exactly sure what they all mean but it helped out the performance tremendiously. went from chooppy and unplayable to everything on highest smooth as heck...

[dlundie]

if it works then leave it...

[Red Harvest]

Glad you've got it working better. Yes, higher amounts of AGP aperture does seem to work better with newer games. Not long ago, anything above 64 MB was unnecessary, but now 128 seems to be the sweet spot, and more might even be better. I increased aperture from 64 to 128 for my 9800 Pro, had forgotten about that. The only real qualifier is that you probably should keep the AGP aperture to no more than half of the system memory (not video card memory.) And if some aperture setting doesn't work well, go back to one that does.

AGP fastwrites can be a problem (or not...) If you start to see trouble, disable AGP fastwrites. They have never given my ATI cards (Radeon ViVo, 8500 and 9800 Pro) any problems on the two systems I've used them in, but eventually after testing, I usually disable fastwrites since they provide no measurable benefit either.

Since you are not having crashes or other problems you should leave the voltages at default. Typically you increase CPU voltage when trying to overclock the CPU (assuming you have good cooling--because more voltage is worse if you have inadequate cooling.) Sometimes you have to increase AGP voltage to allow overclocking a vid card or to strengthen a weak signal by the motherboard. Sometimes you have to increase or decrease memory voltages to stabilize memory (some motherboards overvolt the memory--memory can be picky.) It is really best not to mess with these until you understand what each do, and when to use them. Unless you have an unstable system, they are mainly overclocking tools.

As for the other write settings, I'm not that experienced with them. If everything is stable, terrific! If not then you might have to experiment with switching them.